Cover Art: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 38 pages, 5.5” X 7”
March 2016, ISBN 978-1-936919-36-9
About Aricka Foreman
Aricka Foreman’s chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber was released by YesYes Books in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Drunken Boat, Torch Poetry: A Journal for African American Women, Minnesota Review, Union Station Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, RHINO, shufPoetry, Day One, and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin), among others. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Callaloo Writers Workshop, and is the Enumerate Editor for The Offing.
SEPTEMBER
The air rises to the edge of summer
at 136th and Broadway. Someone bangs
metal with a hammer. A woman on the fourth
floor across the alley plays a melancholy
opera. They both try to fix things inside one
atmosphere. My lover is four states
away and I walk the streets for crocus
and lilac signs that everything is temporary
or at the beginning of the wrong time.
I’d rather put a bell tower inside my chest
or sand inside my shoes. I’ve made my way through
the year of burying. I’m learning to live without. Time
makes room for the digging and I am envious
of the trees now, know in mere weeks they’ll dye
their leaves a different shade of shout. And no one will
tell them move on. No one will say it’s about time.
Dream with a Glass Chamber by Aricka Foreman
September
The air rises to the edge of summer
at 136th and Broadway. Someone bangs
metal with a hammer. A woman on the fourth
floor across the alley plays a melancholy
opera. They both try to fix things inside one
atmosphere. My lover is four states
away and I walk the streets for crocus
and lilac signs that everything is temporary
or at the beginning of the wrong time.
I’d rather put a bell tower inside my chest
or sand inside my shoes. I’ve made my way through
the year of burying. I’m learning to live without. Time
makes room for the digging and I am envious
of the trees now, know in mere weeks they’ll dye
their leaves a different shade of shout. And no one will
tell them move on. No one will say it’s about time.About Dream with a Glass Chamber
Dream with a Glass Chamber is a stark and startling collection made from cities and ghosts, empty whiskey glasses and loss, fire and the ashes that remain. In poem after poem, Aricka Foreman shapes that wreckage into a remarkable elegy. Hers is a vision that’s not content to merely grieve, but one that wrestles grief as if demanding an explanation. “I want to make something useful” she writes, and what she has made here is a light in the dark, an enduring monument.
—Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines
Dream with a Glass Chamber is a response to grief and its complicated rituals. Foreman’s landscape is one of inconvenience and necessity, one that is persistent and preoccupied with understanding absence. The poet leads the way through a chamber of echoes that haunt and press their hooves into the reader’s back. These poems straddle the liminal, their roots in more than one plane of grief at a time and remind us that memory can be a both brutal and a salve. What heals, does so with a scar we learn to live with.
Reviews & Interviews
Interview with Luther Hughes
